Before I had sailed four and twenty hours on the broad bosom of Matushka Volga, I was able to pick out the steamers of all the rival lines at sight with the accuracy of a veteran river pilot.  There was no great cleverness in that, I hasten to add; anybody but a blind man could have done as much; but that only makes my point the more forcible.  It was when we set out for Samara that we realized most keenly the beauties of enterprise in this direction.

We had, nominally, a wide latitude of choice, as all the lines made a stop at our landing.  But when we got tired of waiting for the steamer of our preference,—­the boats of all the lines being long overdue, as usual, owing to low water in the river,—­and took the first which presented itself, we found that the latitude in choice, so far as accommodations were concerned, was even greater than had been apparent at first sight.

Fate allotted us one of the smaller steamers, the more commodious boats having probably “sat down on a sand-bar,” as the local expression goes.  The one on which we embarked had only a small dining-room and saloon, one first-class cabin for men and one for women, all nearly on a level with the water, instead of high aloft, as in the steamers which we had hitherto patronized, and devoid of deck-room for promenading.  The third-class cabin was on the forward deck.  The second-class cabin was down a pair of steep, narrow stairs, whose existence we did not discover when we went on board at midnight, and which did not tempt us to investigation even when we arose the next morning.  Fortunately, there were no candidates except ourselves and a Russian friend for the six red velvet divans ranged round the walls of the tiny “ladies’ cabin,” and the adjoining toilet-room, and the man of the party enjoyed complete seclusion in the men’s cabin.  In the large boats, for the same price, we should have had separate staterooms, each accommodating two persons.  However, everything was beautifully clean, as usual on Russian steamers so far as my experience goes, and it made no difference for one night.  The experience was merely of interest as a warning.

The city of Samara, as it presented itself to our eyes the next morning, was the liveliest place on the river Volga next to Nizhni Novgorod.  While it really is of importance commercially, owing to its position on the Volga and on the railway from central Russia, as a depot for the great Siberian trade through Orenburg, the impression of alertness which it produces is undoubtedly due to the fact that it presents itself to full view in the foreground, instead of lying at a distance from the wharves, or entirely concealed.  An American, who is accustomed to see railways and steamers run through the very heart of the cities which they serve, never gets thoroughly inured to the Russian trick of taking important towns on faith, because it has happened to be convenient to place the stations out of sight and hearing, sometimes miles out of the city.  Another striking point about Samara is the abundance of red brick buildings, which is very unusual, not to say unprecedented, in most of the older Russian towns, which revel in stucco washed with white, blue, and yellow.